13 ms·

Firefox 7 will use up to 50% less memory

149 points by ukdm 15y ago

mgkimsal 15y ago
I'm reminded of MySQL. "You don't have transaction support" "Sure we do - just handle it in your code" "But I need transactions" "No you don't! That's just overarchitecting!" "No really I do" "Look how fast we are!" ... years later... "Hey look at MySQL - We have transactions! Look how great we are!" etc. I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming out saying they never see FF memory issues, the OP must be doing something wrong or have a bad system, they use their computer non-stop for 4 years without ever even seeing FF slow down, etc. Then endless discussion about "how can you even function having more than 2 tabs open? I always close all mine because of some cognition study from 1974 which I read in my one open tab, then closed it". Now many of those same people will be spouting how great FF is because they've cut memory usage so much (and maybe how they'll venture in to the brave new world of 3-tabs-at-a-time). End of the day, this is just how computer stuff goes - deny there's a problem, fix it, then promote how great your fix is. Just gets a bit tiresome. Oh, and yes, I set up a bunch of strawmen up there. I love the smell of them burning in the morning.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  You often see the same pattern with OS. User4,27,128: "I think there might be an issue." Fanboy37,652: "What are you talking about? This is the best thing ever!!!" Fanboy23,418: "That easy to fix, just type everything backward while singing and it all works fine!!1!" ... Dev15: "Fixed problem 4,129" Fanboy37,652: "Now that that's fixed, this is the best thing ever!!1!"
  - DasIch 15y ago
    As long as the devs stay sane it's not too much of a problem.
    - shadowfox 15y ago
      Users might have some issues finding help on their problems though.
- jmillikin 15y ago
  > I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment > about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming > out saying they never see FF memory issues, the OP must be > doing something wrong or have a bad system, they use their > computer non-stop for 4 years without ever even seeing FF > slow down, etc. That's because complaints about large memory use in Firefox fall into two camps, generally: 1. "I left Firefox on overnight with three tabs open, and now it's using 3.1 GiB of memory. This browser is terrible! Yes, I do have dozens of low-quality extensions installed, so?" 2. "I started Firefox, and already it's using over 300 MiB! That's insane! Why would a web browser ever use that much? I'm switching to Chrome, it only uses 100 MiB. What do you mean, 'multiple processes'?" There may in fact be genuine issues buried somewhere in the discussion, but they're hard to discern against the general background noise. > Then endless discussion about "how can you even function > having more than 2 tabs open? I always close all mine > because of some cognition study from 1974 which I read in > my one open tab, then closed it". You're getting confused between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox has always been the browser of choice for the "tons of tabs" crowd, because Chrome's process-per-tab model breaks down when there's more than a few dozen open. For example, I have just over 70 tabs open right now, Firefox has been running for about a month, and it's at 1.1 GiB resident memory. Chrome becomes very unhappy under such circumstances (since it uses about ~100 MiB per tab), so I'm careful to only open a few tabs at a time.
  - crikli 15y ago
    > I have just over 70 tabs open... I'm really curious about this as once I get to about 10 tabs my brain starts wanting to close them to get back to something it can manage. This is either because I'm dumb (highly likely) or because you have a different usage style than I (also likely). So if you don't mind elaborating, how do you get to where you have that many tabs open?
    - webspiderus 15y ago
      as a potentially different use case, I use my tabs as a stack for reading things (where I push a link when I see it), and will then read through them all in a serial fashion, closing things I'm 'done' with. this generally leads to me having reference and 'to read' tabs open, in addition to things I like to have on hand (i.e. emails, workflowy, HN). this generally adds up to 15-20 tabs in my main window on average, going up to as much as 30-40.
- carussell 15y ago
  That's interesting. Because every time I've seen Mozilla developers making note of memory improvements over the last few years, I run into someone claiming that every time "Firefox" and "memory usage" came up prior to whichever is current for the time, the developers steadfastly denied a problem. It's getting a bit like the mythical proslytizing vegan; I've run into far more people bitching about however many instances of fuss-making by however many hostile vegans than I have of actual hostile vegans. (The count of the latter can be described as "basically none".)
  - carussell 15y ago
    Challenges?
  - mgkimsal 15y ago
    for me it wasn't developers specifically, it was just vocal users. i've not seen much from mozdevs at all contemporaneously with the discussions.
    - carussell 15y ago
      > deny there's a problem, fix it, then promote how great your fix is I can't think of a way this can be construed as an indictment against vocal users, or really, anyone except the developers (or marketing or management from the same organization).
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  > we usually see a bunch of people coming out None of whom are actually active Firefox or Gecko developers... In other words, fanboys act like fanboys. Surprise!
Maro 15y ago
I'm using Firefox 5.0.1, I just clicked "Check for updates" and it said I'm up-to-date. Shouldn't 6 come out first? Isn't it too early to talk about 7? I think this is bad marketing from Mozilla, they're totally confusing people.
- wmf 15y ago
  For better or worse, that's how open source works. You can't really control the message by keeping future versions secret.
- fredleblanc 15y ago
  Agreed. And in those charts, a view of Firefox 8 puts the memory back up a bit. A quick look makes it feel like two steps forward, one step back.
  - pohl 15y ago
    http://blargon7.com/2011/07/endurance-tests-demonstrate-firefoxs-memory-usage-improvements/ http://blargon7.com/2011/07/endurance-tests-demonstrate-fire... Update: It appears that the explicit memory calculated for Firefox 7 on Mac was artificially low. This explains the slight increase in Firefox 8. If you’re interested you can read further details on Bugzilla. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851
- windsurfer 15y ago
  Firefox 7 isn't even a real release. You'll have to wait for 8. The new versioning system uses the Fibonacci sequence, so that after 8, the next "real" release will be 13, and then 21 etc. This is why you're currently stuck on 5.
  - samstokes 15y ago
    Satire much?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
heelhook 15y ago
I don't know what everyone is complaining about, whenever I want to open a few more tabs I just purchase a couple more gigs of ram, problem solved, bunch of whiners!
- pestaa 15y ago
  There are hundreds of better ways to pack & deliver your sarcasm.
  - heelhook 15y ago
    Yeah? For example?
sp332 15y ago
It's not that Firefox is actually using that much memory. It's not even that it has a memory leak in the usual sense of a broken garbage collector or something. It all down to memory fragmentation. You can see illustrations of browser memory fragmentation here: http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ Firefox switched to jemalloc in 2008, which cut memory usage to less than half. http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/ http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/
- capnrefsmmat 15y ago
  Many of the Firefox 7 fixes that reduced memory usage did not have to do with fragmentation; there were a number of true memory leaks fixed, and other bugs where code was allocating more memory than it ever could need. (For example, I think there was a bug where the find-as-you-type bar could keep the page in memory forever if it wasn't dismissed.)
  - khuey 15y ago
    That's correct, but the big fix people are talking about was a fragmentation fix. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
fedorabbit 15y ago
This version inflation thing is getting a bit out of hand...I'm using Firefox 5 right now, I don't feel any difference from Firefox 4.
- AndyKelley 15y ago
  The problem with using that metric is that the "feel" of a program is directly related to the UI changes that the version employs. You could change absolutely nothing bug and feature wise, but do a UI redesign and the new version would feel like it was updated a whole bunch.
  - fedorabbit 15y ago
    What's wrong with subversion system for bug fixes? So, you mean they fixed so many bugs, improved so many back-end features in Firefox 4, which perfectly justifies a version jump from 4 to 7? I seem to remember old days Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 took forever...
    - capnrefsmmat 15y ago
      They're not jumping from 4 to 7. 5 has been released; 6 will be released soon; 7 will be released six weeks after that. It's a time-based schedule with a new version number every six weeks. Mozilla was sick of defining features for a given version and then delaying releases for months because of too-ambitious goals, so they switched to a whatever-is-done-by-the-deadline system. Version numbers aren't particularly meaningful.
  - r00fus 15y ago
    Which is why I like Ubuntu's YY.MM versioning - it's completely natural and expected. I also like build numbers like Microsoft and Apple give, you know if OSX 10.7 GM seed is different from the GA release by looking at the build (e.g. 11A494A)
- stanleydrew 15y ago
  I'm using Firefox 5 right now, I don't feel any difference from Firefox 4. That's exactly the point. Which version of Gmail are we on right now? 477? Does that feel different from 476? I don't know. I just get performance improvements and new features as they come out.
hack_edu 15y ago
Since when has Firefox/Mozilla NOT promised that their next release will manage memory better?
- capnrefsmmat 15y ago
  They've started getting more serious about it. One of their big new JavaScript performance features, type inference, was backed out as soon as they realized it causes significantly increased memory usage -- and it won't get back in until it slims down, despite significant JS performance benefits. In the past, many features slipped in with memory problems and weren't noticed for months or years.
- trustfundbaby 15y ago
  I smirked at the headline when I saw it and I came here to say the same thing ... Every release they promise that firefox will use less memory ... hasn't happened yet AFAIK.
  - dailycavalier 15y ago
    The Aurora channel, which is the code that will soon become Firefox 7, has some pretty big memory improvements. Nicholas Nethercote is leading Firefox's memshrink effort and shared the results so far: http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast-2/ http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-...
- andhow 15y ago
  Umm, the claim wasn't speculative, it was measured on an aurora release that you can test out right now: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel.
u48998 15y ago
Could someone help identify why Firefox saves and keeps such a ridiculous number of Cache folders in \\Application Data\...\Profiles\... They're all 0, 1, 2...and then 01, 0A, 0B. I mean, what's the point here?
- mbrubeck 15y ago
  Filesystem performance tends to degrade when you have tens of thousands of files in a single directory, so programs that manage thousands of files usually end up dividing them into many subdirectories. It's not just Firefox - git uses the same strategy, for example.
grimen 15y ago
Well, even with that it won't be comparable to Chrome I'm afraid. Firefox became very heavy suring the years. And no I don't have a lot of add-ons; I have 2 addons in FF and 15 addons in Chrome and yet Chrome processes suck much less memory even if i run it for days without closing. People switching to Chrome is not just PR, really.
- william42 15y ago
  Well, one thing is that Chrome extensions are much more limited; also, they only even run when you let them.
  - grimen 15y ago
    Still, Chrome eats less memory than FF with 1-2 extensions (Firebug - very often disabled, and a FB addon). How can you argue against that? Just accept the fact that FF got issues.
oppositionradio 15y ago
I left firefox once and for all this week. its too bad, i like what the they are working with identity built into the browser.
- stanleydrew 15y ago
  Chrome/ChromeOS/Chromium(OS) is working on identity built in to the browser as well via multiple profiles: http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles
callahad 15y ago
Can anyone explain why the explicit memory metrics apparently regress between Firefox 7 and Firefox 8?
- capnrefsmmat 15y ago
  A bug in how they were counted in FF7: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851
sliverstorm 15y ago
"up to 50% less"? That is a major weasel statement. It could use 1% less and still meet the "goal".
- starwed 15y ago
  I think you misunderstood -- it's not a goal but a measurement. The actual statement, if you read the original source[1], is >Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. [1] http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast-2/ http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-...
yason 15y ago
Memory is cheap. High UI latency and cross-browser crashes aren't. Sorry.
- lurker19 15y ago
  Some people run other apps alongside Firefox and some of those apps also want to provide low UI latency.
- vegai 15y ago
  "Memory is cheap." Please leave this field.
- andhow 15y ago
  Paging isn't cheap; neither are cache misses.
drieddust 15y ago
I have switched to Firefox 8 nightly 64 bit 2 week and never turned back to stable release. Firefox 8 is current state is performing an order of magnitude better than the current stable release. They are definitely improving at an escalating pace ever since chrome and safari started eating into their market share.
marckremers 15y ago
There's something inherently wrong about the headline of this. How did they get to such a high usage in the first place? They sacrificed performance for features, and now going back to clean up the mess. Not elegant. This is why I'm sticking with Chrome.

149 points by ukdm 15y ago

I'm reminded of MySQL. "You don't have transaction support" "Sure we do - just handle it in your code" "But I need transactions" "No you don't! That's just overarchitecting!" "No really I do" "Look how fast we are!" ... years later... "Hey look at MySQL - We have transactions! Look how great we are!" etc. I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming out saying they never see FF memory issues, the OP must be doing something wrong or have a bad system, they use their computer non-stop for 4 years without ever even seeing FF slow down, etc. Then endless discussion about "how can you even function having more than 2 tabs open? I always close all mine because of some cognition study from 1974 which I read in my one open tab, then closed it". Now many of those same people will be spouting how great FF is because they've cut memory usage so much (and maybe how they'll venture in to the brave new world of 3-tabs-at-a-time). End of the day, this is just how computer stuff goes - deny there's a problem, fix it, then promote how great your fix is. Just gets a bit tiresome. Oh, and yes, I set up a bunch of strawmen up there. I love the smell of them burning in the morning.

onemoreact 15y ago
You often see the same pattern with OS. User4,27,128: "I think there might be an issue." Fanboy37,652: "What are you talking about? This is the best thing ever!!!" Fanboy23,418: "That easy to fix, just type everything backward while singing and it all works fine!!1!" ... Dev15: "Fixed problem 4,129" Fanboy37,652: "Now that that's fixed, this is the best thing ever!!1!"
- DasIch 15y ago
  As long as the devs stay sane it's not too much of a problem.
  - shadowfox 15y ago
    Users might have some issues finding help on their problems though.
jmillikin 15y ago
> I like FF. I use it. But every time there's some comment > about FF memory, we usually see a bunch of people coming > out saying they never see FF memory issues, the OP must be > doing something wrong or have a bad system, they use their > computer non-stop for 4 years without ever even seeing FF > slow down, etc. That's because complaints about large memory use in Firefox fall into two camps, generally: 1. "I left Firefox on overnight with three tabs open, and now it's using 3.1 GiB of memory. This browser is terrible! Yes, I do have dozens of low-quality extensions installed, so?" 2. "I started Firefox, and already it's using over 300 MiB! That's insane! Why would a web browser ever use that much? I'm switching to Chrome, it only uses 100 MiB. What do you mean, 'multiple processes'?" There may in fact be genuine issues buried somewhere in the discussion, but they're hard to discern against the general background noise. > Then endless discussion about "how can you even function > having more than 2 tabs open? I always close all mine > because of some cognition study from 1974 which I read in > my one open tab, then closed it". You're getting confused between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox has always been the browser of choice for the "tons of tabs" crowd, because Chrome's process-per-tab model breaks down when there's more than a few dozen open. For example, I have just over 70 tabs open right now, Firefox has been running for about a month, and it's at 1.1 GiB resident memory. Chrome becomes very unhappy under such circumstances (since it uses about ~100 MiB per tab), so I'm careful to only open a few tabs at a time.
- crikli 15y ago
  > I have just over 70 tabs open... I'm really curious about this as once I get to about 10 tabs my brain starts wanting to close them to get back to something it can manage. This is either because I'm dumb (highly likely) or because you have a different usage style than I (also likely). So if you don't mind elaborating, how do you get to where you have that many tabs open?
  - webspiderus 15y ago
    as a potentially different use case, I use my tabs as a stack for reading things (where I push a link when I see it), and will then read through them all in a serial fashion, closing things I'm 'done' with. this generally leads to me having reference and 'to read' tabs open, in addition to things I like to have on hand (i.e. emails, workflowy, HN). this generally adds up to 15-20 tabs in my main window on average, going up to as much as 30-40.
carussell 15y ago
That's interesting. Because every time I've seen Mozilla developers making note of memory improvements over the last few years, I run into someone claiming that every time "Firefox" and "memory usage" came up prior to whichever is current for the time, the developers steadfastly denied a problem. It's getting a bit like the mythical proslytizing vegan; I've run into far more people bitching about however many instances of fuss-making by however many hostile vegans than I have of actual hostile vegans. (The count of the latter can be described as "basically none".)
- carussell 15y ago
  Challenges?
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  for me it wasn't developers specifically, it was just vocal users. i've not seen much from mozdevs at all contemporaneously with the discussions.
  - carussell 15y ago
    > deny there's a problem, fix it, then promote how great your fix is I can't think of a way this can be construed as an indictment against vocal users, or really, anyone except the developers (or marketing or management from the same organization).
bzbarsky 15y ago
> we usually see a bunch of people coming out None of whom are actually active Firefox or Gecko developers... In other words, fanboys act like fanboys. Surprise!

Maro 15y ago

I'm using Firefox 5.0.1, I just clicked "Check for updates" and it said I'm up-to-date. Shouldn't 6 come out first? Isn't it too early to talk about 7? I think this is bad marketing from Mozilla, they're totally confusing people.

wmf 15y ago
For better or worse, that's how open source works. You can't really control the message by keeping future versions secret.
fredleblanc 15y ago
Agreed. And in those charts, a view of Firefox 8 puts the memory back up a bit. A quick look makes it feel like two steps forward, one step back.
- pohl 15y ago
  http://blargon7.com/2011/07/endurance-tests-demonstrate-firefoxs-memory-usage-improvements/ http://blargon7.com/2011/07/endurance-tests-demonstrate-fire... Update: It appears that the explicit memory calculated for Firefox 7 on Mac was artificially low. This explains the slight increase in Firefox 8. If you’re interested you can read further details on Bugzilla. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851
windsurfer 15y ago
Firefox 7 isn't even a real release. You'll have to wait for 8. The new versioning system uses the Fibonacci sequence, so that after 8, the next "real" release will be 13, and then 21 etc. This is why you're currently stuck on 5.
- samstokes 15y ago
  Satire much?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

heelhook 15y ago

I don't know what everyone is complaining about, whenever I want to open a few more tabs I just purchase a couple more gigs of ram, problem solved, bunch of whiners!

pestaa 15y ago
There are hundreds of better ways to pack & deliver your sarcasm.
- heelhook 15y ago
  Yeah? For example?

sp332 15y ago

It's not that Firefox is actually using that much memory. It's not even that it has a memory leak in the usual sense of a broken garbage collector or something. It all down to memory fragmentation. You can see illustrations of browser memory fragmentation here: http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ Firefox switched to jemalloc in 2008, which cut memory usage to less than half. http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/ http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

capnrefsmmat 15y ago
Many of the Firefox 7 fixes that reduced memory usage did not have to do with fragmentation; there were a number of true memory leaks fixed, and other bugs where code was allocating more memory than it ever could need. (For example, I think there was a bug where the find-as-you-type bar could keep the page in memory forever if it wasn't dismissed.)
- khuey 15y ago
  That's correct, but the big fix people are talking about was a fragmentation fix. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

fedorabbit 15y ago

This version inflation thing is getting a bit out of hand...I'm using Firefox 5 right now, I don't feel any difference from Firefox 4.

AndyKelley 15y ago
The problem with using that metric is that the "feel" of a program is directly related to the UI changes that the version employs. You could change absolutely nothing bug and feature wise, but do a UI redesign and the new version would feel like it was updated a whole bunch.
- fedorabbit 15y ago
  What's wrong with subversion system for bug fixes? So, you mean they fixed so many bugs, improved so many back-end features in Firefox 4, which perfectly justifies a version jump from 4 to 7? I seem to remember old days Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 took forever...
  - capnrefsmmat 15y ago
    They're not jumping from 4 to 7. 5 has been released; 6 will be released soon; 7 will be released six weeks after that. It's a time-based schedule with a new version number every six weeks. Mozilla was sick of defining features for a given version and then delaying releases for months because of too-ambitious goals, so they switched to a whatever-is-done-by-the-deadline system. Version numbers aren't particularly meaningful.
- r00fus 15y ago
  Which is why I like Ubuntu's YY.MM versioning - it's completely natural and expected. I also like build numbers like Microsoft and Apple give, you know if OSX 10.7 GM seed is different from the GA release by looking at the build (e.g. 11A494A)
stanleydrew 15y ago
I'm using Firefox 5 right now, I don't feel any difference from Firefox 4. That's exactly the point. Which version of Gmail are we on right now? 477? Does that feel different from 476? I don't know. I just get performance improvements and new features as they come out.

hack_edu 15y ago

Since when has Firefox/Mozilla NOT promised that their next release will manage memory better?

capnrefsmmat 15y ago
They've started getting more serious about it. One of their big new JavaScript performance features, type inference, was backed out as soon as they realized it causes significantly increased memory usage -- and it won't get back in until it slims down, despite significant JS performance benefits. In the past, many features slipped in with memory problems and weren't noticed for months or years.
trustfundbaby 15y ago
I smirked at the headline when I saw it and I came here to say the same thing ... Every release they promise that firefox will use less memory ... hasn't happened yet AFAIK.
- dailycavalier 15y ago
  The Aurora channel, which is the code that will soon become Firefox 7, has some pretty big memory improvements. Nicholas Nethercote is leading Firefox's memshrink effort and shared the results so far: http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast-2/ http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-...
andhow 15y ago
Umm, the claim wasn't speculative, it was measured on an aurora release that you can test out right now: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel.

u48998 15y ago

Could someone help identify why Firefox saves and keeps such a ridiculous number of Cache folders in \\Application Data\...\Profiles\... They're all 0, 1, 2...and then 01, 0A, 0B. I mean, what's the point here?

mbrubeck 15y ago
Filesystem performance tends to degrade when you have tens of thousands of files in a single directory, so programs that manage thousands of files usually end up dividing them into many subdirectories. It's not just Firefox - git uses the same strategy, for example.

grimen 15y ago

Well, even with that it won't be comparable to Chrome I'm afraid. Firefox became very heavy suring the years. And no I don't have a lot of add-ons; I have 2 addons in FF and 15 addons in Chrome and yet Chrome processes suck much less memory even if i run it for days without closing. People switching to Chrome is not just PR, really.

william42 15y ago
Well, one thing is that Chrome extensions are much more limited; also, they only even run when you let them.
- grimen 15y ago
  Still, Chrome eats less memory than FF with 1-2 extensions (Firebug - very often disabled, and a FB addon). How can you argue against that? Just accept the fact that FF got issues.

oppositionradio 15y ago

I left firefox once and for all this week. its too bad, i like what the they are working with identity built into the browser.

stanleydrew 15y ago
Chrome/ChromeOS/Chromium(OS) is working on identity built in to the browser as well via multiple profiles: http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles

callahad 15y ago

Can anyone explain why the explicit memory metrics apparently regress between Firefox 7 and Firefox 8?

capnrefsmmat 15y ago
A bug in how they were counted in FF7: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673851

sliverstorm 15y ago

"up to 50% less"? That is a major weasel statement. It could use 1% less and still meet the "goal".

starwed 15y ago
I think you misunderstood -- it's not a goal but a measurement. The actual statement, if you read the original source[1], is >Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. [1] http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast-2/ http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-...

yason 15y ago

Memory is cheap. High UI latency and cross-browser crashes aren't. Sorry.

lurker19 15y ago
Some people run other apps alongside Firefox and some of those apps also want to provide low UI latency.
vegai 15y ago
"Memory is cheap." Please leave this field.
andhow 15y ago
Paging isn't cheap; neither are cache misses.

drieddust 15y ago

I have switched to Firefox 8 nightly 64 bit 2 week and never turned back to stable release. Firefox 8 is current state is performing an order of magnitude better than the current stable release. They are definitely improving at an escalating pace ever since chrome and safari started eating into their market share.

marckremers 15y ago

There's something inherently wrong about the headline of this. How did they get to such a high usage in the first place? They sacrificed performance for features, and now going back to clean up the mess. Not elegant. This is why I'm sticking with Chrome.